Perfecting their craft

Local roasters contribute to national trend in coffee consumption

Goshen Coffee roaster Argus Keppel, top, monitors the roaster at the company’s facility on First Avenue in Edwardsville as a bright blue flame shoots into the rear of the roaster.

Keppel holds a handful of fresh coffee beans which before roasting are a shade of green. The roasting process, which takes around 15 minutes, enlarges the beans and gives them the brown color consumers are used to seeing. Goshen Coffee uses beans from various countries in the “coffee belt” where growing conditions are ideal like Columbia, Costa Roca, Mexico and Guatemala just to name a few.

Goshen Coffee employee Karl Frank bags up a few small bags of the company’s coffee. Larger bags are supplied to restaurants across the region.

A large bird adorns one of the Edwardsville company’s delivery trucks.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau North American Industry Classification System

EDWARDSVILLE — In an instant gratification-driven world, the process by which BunkHouse Joe Coffee roasts its beans is anything but.

The Fieldon-based craft coffee company starts by making fires from only dead, fallen trees, and waiting four hours for the coals to get to the right temperature. Only then are the beans roasted in 20-pound intervals for 20 to 25 minutes in a hand-turned stainless steel cylinder, each new batch as tediously prepared as the last.

For the popular morning beverage, it’s an attention to detail that has grown in recent years, not only in the Metro East but across the country. In the St. Louis metropolitan area, with a population of about 2.9 million, there’s a coffee shop for every 7,400 people, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and there are at least 17 coffee roasters providing those shops with high-quality, “craft” concoctions like those of BunkHouse Joe’s.

Allen Leibowitz, chair of the Roasters Guild, an official trade group of the Specialty Coffee Association of America, said the popularity of craft coffee speaks to the evolution of food and drink consumption as a whole.

“I think just a reflection of our current culture,” Leibowitz said of the lengthy farming, harvesting and manufacturing processes that precludes a morning mug. “We’re broadly more aware of what we eat. You see it in everything, and coffee is something that really has to have a lot of craft. There’s a lot of detail in a cup of coffee.”

A growing trend

The prevalence of local coffee roasters has been growing for over a decade. Out of those 17 area roasters, 11 were founded after 2000. Only three — Chauvin, Ronnoco and Thomas — were formed in the first half of the 20th century.

St. Louis has always been a coffee town, ideally located on the Mississippi River and imbued with a strong sense of commerce, according to the Missouri History Museum. But the number of coffee shops has increased steadily in the past 15 years, only seeing a dip during the Great Recession in the late 2000s.

“Specialty coffee has really been on the rise for the past 15 or 20 years. At first it was kind of a bigger city thing,” Leibowitz said. “I think it’s always frankly had a strong foothold in certain regions like Boston, San Francisco, Seattle. My gut feeling is some of the smaller cities progress a little bit more slowly.”

There were less than 300 “snack and nonalcoholic beverage bars” — the government classification that includes coffee shops — in the metropolitan area in 1997, compared to more than 390 in 2013. The government doesn’t classify independently owned specialty coffee shops, but there are more than 30 independent cafes serving up craft coffee in the region.

A rapid, high density influx of specialty coffee in cities like Seattle contributed to its early success as a coffee hub, Leibowitz said, and now the trend is growing in smaller metropolitan areas like St. Louis.

“The spread of specialty coffee roasting at some point is what you want. You want that density, the awareness, and then what happens is kind of an exponential boom,” Leibowitz said. “Then it’s kind of a slow burn. People start realizing what that product is. First they start differentiating from the gas station coffee, go to a national chain, and at some point most of us experience this thing where people are curious and they want a better product, better control over who’s crafting it. That local thing is really important.”

A changing landscape

Josh Ferguson, who co-owns St. Louis-based Kaldi’s Coffee, said independent roasters and coffee shops have sprouted up in the area in response to consumer demand.

“When we opened our doors in 1994, the access to quality coffee in St. Louis was very limited,” said Ferguson.

The company now owns and operates 12 coffee shops in Missouri, and distributes its beans to 20 retailers. It roasts, packages and ships coffee from its Midtown roastery.

Now, Ferguson added, “consumers have a better understanding of what quality coffee tastes like and the demand for better coffees continues to grow. The St. Louis coffee scene continues to improve with growing access to great coffee.”

Metro East roasters like BunkHouse Joe and Edwardsville-based Goshen Coffee Company joined the locally roasted craft coffee market in the 2000s.

BunkHouse Joe’s organic, fair-trade coffee was born out of owner Steve Johnson’s “life-long quest for the best cup of coffee.”

“Through the years I have been disappointed with what was offered,” said Johnson, who started roasting coffee in 2009. “The beans we acquired produced an incomparable cup of coffee to what we and most people around have ever experienced.”

And once you go craft, there’s no going back, says Goshen roaster Argus Keppel, who has been with the company for three and a half years. Goshen also brews only organic and fair trade coffee.

“A lot of people come in here, buy this coffee, ask questions about beans, and in a couple weeks, they can’t drink what they were drinking before anymore,” Keppel said. “These (specialty Goshen Roasts), you’re like, I can taste everything.”

Too big for craft

One challenge facing craft roasters is the quandary of becoming too big to maintain craft quality. Though Goshen produces on a larger scale, both BunkHouse and Goshen are run by a small group of friends or family. To them, growth doesn’t necessarily mean changing the process, but duplicating and improving it, the roasters say.

Edwardsville’s Goshen, founded in 2001 by former owner Matthew Herren, will roast 100,000 pounds of coffee by the end of 2015, with only four employees. When Keppel joined the business three and a half years ago, Goshen was only producing 56,000. They sell dozens of varieties at 60 Schnucks and 25 Dierbergs grocery stores in the region, among other retailers.

“We do know that there’s not one way to do it. We can have way more potential customers that way,” said Keppel. “There’s a tipping point for sure, but there’s a lot of good examples of places that have gone bigger but have still kept the craft mentality. There’s totally room for growth, but we’ll take the right steps and go down the right path.”

With the painstaking detail that goes into every batch, turning down retailers is a necessity for Johnson’s company.

“It’s maybe not best from a business standpoint, but it’s the best in preserving the integrity in what we have to offer,” the owner said. “We’ve duplicated our small-batch stations to keep our small-batch, artisan approach. If we have to have 10 or 20 of these little stations, so be it.”

It’s the dedication of craft roasters like BunkHouse Joe, which only sells to 12 retail locations, that will keep consumers coming back into the future, Leibowitz said.

“I really think that’s what differentiates craft roasters, the quality, care and preparation, which is really another way of saying it’s a better quality product,” Leibowitz said. “Why is it people like to go to a local shop? You want to know who’s making your coffee, she’ll remember your name, and she’s going to be there in a year.

“Specialty craft roasters can provide the product and the service behind it. It’s all about the intent.”

for the popular morning beverage

Reporter Kelsey Landis can be reached at 618-208-6460, Ext. 1396 or on Twitter @kelseylandis.

Goshen Coffee roaster Argus Keppel, top, monitors the roaster at the company’s facility on First Avenue in Edwardsville as a bright blue flame shoots into the rear of the roaster.

http://thetelegraph.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/web1_GoshenCoffee1LEAD.jpgGoshen Coffee roaster Argus Keppel, top, monitors the roaster at the company’s facility on First Avenue in Edwardsville as a bright blue flame shoots into the rear of the roaster.

Keppel holds a handful of fresh coffee beans which before roasting are a shade of green. The roasting process, which takes around 15 minutes, enlarges the beans and gives them the brown color consumers are used to seeing. Goshen Coffee uses beans from various countries in the “coffee belt” where growing conditions are ideal like Columbia, Costa Roca, Mexico and Guatemala just to name a few.

http://thetelegraph.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/web1_GoshenCoffee2SECONDARY.jpgKeppel holds a handful of fresh coffee beans which before roasting are a shade of green. The roasting process, which takes around 15 minutes, enlarges the beans and gives them the brown color consumers are used to seeing. Goshen Coffee uses beans from various countries in the “coffee belt” where growing conditions are ideal like Columbia, Costa Roca, Mexico and Guatemala just to name a few.

Goshen Coffee employee Karl Frank bags up a few small bags of the company’s coffee. Larger bags are supplied to restaurants across the region.

http://thetelegraph.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/web1_GoshenCoffee3JUMP.jpgGoshen Coffee employee Karl Frank bags up a few small bags of the company’s coffee. Larger bags are supplied to restaurants across the region.

A large bird adorns one of the Edwardsville company’s delivery trucks.

http://thetelegraph.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/web1_GoshenCoffee4JUMPorSKYBOX.jpgA large bird adorns one of the Edwardsville company’s delivery trucks.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau North American Industry Classification System

http://thetelegraph.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/web1_graph.jpgSource: U.S. Census Bureau North American Industry Classification System

Reporter Kelsey Landis can be reached at 618-208-6460, Ext. 1396 or on Twitter @kelseylandis.